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Honoring Charles Dickens

Today February 7th in 1812 the great Charles Dickens was born. Dickens wrote countless classics that everyone knows; A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and the list goes on. He is the author and creator of many famous and timeless characters; Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, etc. His literature has reached far and wide, beyond what I think he ever could have imagined; T.V. series, movies, sequels, adaptations galore! He has an iconic style and ambiance to his work that is haunting and beautiful.

Here are a few quotes that I love, may they inspire you:

I love those, especially the one about lightening the burdens of another,
it is so powerful.

What do you like/dislike about Charles Dickens?What are you favorite works?

128 thoughts on “Honoring Charles Dickens”

As a child, I never really liked reading his books; they always seemed so dark and gloomy. But I think that I should give them a go again now that I am older. Which book would you recommend to try and kindle a love for reading Charles Dickens? By the way, those quotes are really cool. I had heard the first one before but didn’t realise it was CD that said/wrote it. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. 😃

Thanks Abbie! I am going to read it with a fresh pair of eyes for Mr Dickens. I fly to Australia in less than a month so this can be my plane book. 😃 If I like it I Wil come back and update my comments here! Ciao.

Wanted to chime in and suggest a read of the Christmas carol -even tho we know the story quite well – when I read the book last year I forgot how much from a book gets lost even in the best movie- so grab a copy if you can – 😉

Hi, thanks so much for the chime in! Really really great to get some additional feedback 😃. I will definitely give it a go too. Thanks so much again and have a great rest of the weekend. With best wishes, Rachel.

thanks for the reply – and when I read it recently I was surprised by how much social stuff he adds that we miss the first few times (or I did) – like just describing his nephew laughing – wow – pretty awesome.

Love, love, love Charles Dickens! He created the most amazing charters and painted an accurate picture of life in Victorian England. ON BBC right now they are running a series called Dickensian based on Dicken’s characters. It is sooooo good. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06vbmfq

Thanks for the reminder, Abbie Lu. I read A Tale of Two Cities a couple of years ago and i cried at the end, very rare for me. ‘It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done before.’ Now i understand the quote it is very powerful when I see it used.

I think that if you love a Dickens book, it stays with you forever. Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and son, David Copperfield and Bleak House are my top 5 favourites. So many great characters too, I don’t think he ever gave anyone a boring name!

I think “Bleak House” was my favorite. But I never rated Dickens as high as George Eliot or even Anthony Trollop. Dickens always seemed to present us with two-dimensional characters and was a bit melodramatic. Eliot was not only a great writer, she was an incredibly wise woman as well.

I love the quotes, and my favourite, as an adult, is David Copperfield. As a child, it was A Christmas Carol, and then later, Oliver Twist. Isn’t it strange how our tastes vary a little depending upon our age at the time? By the way, I NEVER found his characters to be two-dimensional at all. I love all his books 🙂

No one who understands the difference between literature and the ‘the other stuff’ can ever say his characters are two-dimensional. Truth is; I think having the ability to perceive the nested patterns of plot, form, the embedded humanity in the characters a writer develops gives us an Escher like quality of something more than a simple story to entertain. It gives us knowledge, wisdom, the process of living through the experiences of another life, another generation, pain, fear, all the emotions which helps to develop the strength of an individual over time. Books become friends to us through the tactile and visual process that over time breeds an understanding of the world that is lost to those who do not read, do not learn, or spend there two-dimensional existences scrutinizing anything they can’t conceive of outside their world.

I love to read; I’m a fan of b-grade novels, as well as the classics, they all entertain; but literature teaches, helps us find understanding, holds our souls to the nature of what and whom came before. We find a history through what we read, and often a future as well.

Great Expectations is my favorite Dickens Novel; but its hard to compare, all of them were and are so alive.

One of my favorite authors! I have read most of his works, and I really enjoyed David Copperfield (Leo Tolstoy called it the greatest book ever written). Although it is very difficult to say which of his works are the best. Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son are also very good, but not as popular. Thanks for the post Abbie!

I love that 2nd quote….struck a chord with me and today was a good day for me to read it, so thank you! 🙂 I enjoyed Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol – the only two of his I have read so far. I still have a long way to go! 🙂

It has to be Great Expectations. I studied it as a student and the story has always stuck with me.

Ironically I’ve been reading The Signalman with some 11/12 year olds that I’m currently teaching this term. We’ve switched backwards and forwards between the written novel and the film. I was concerned as the text is difficult to understand and didn’t want them to lose interest. I now have a small class of budding Dickens enthusiasts who are looking forward to a debate on spectres next week.

I recently read A Tale of Two Cities, and was struck by the facial descriptions of his characters. I understand the slow beginning is a challenge, but the end makes it more than worth the effort, in my opinion. It will likely remain my favorite Dickens.

Also, in December my wife took me to “A Dickens Christmas,” a production put on by a local college in an intimate setting meant to resemble the Dickens home. We heard actors playing him and his family tell stories and and sing period Christmas songs, and the audience/guests sang along with some of them. We drank warm apple cider and tried figgy pudding. It was a lot of fun!

Charles Dickens… I remember when I first meet him. Christmas and Christmas’s Tale was on TV. I remember being sooo in love with the story that I searched about the author… Until nowadays, it’s my favorite story to read at christmas night. Then, Oliver Twist. So touching… Charles will forever be one of my favorite writers!

Dickens isn’t easy reading, but I did love Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. I reviewed a picture book a couple of years ago for children, A BOY CALLED DICKENS. Great introductory book for kids. You get a peek into how hard his life was and where many of his characters came from.

I wasn’t exposed to great literature until I was 28. Those two lines from Great Expectations are lines I will never forget when My English 101 Professor read them out-loud in class. Fast forward many years later and now I am reading these same lines to my class.

That is interesting to me. I think, of all his “semi-dark” novels, “A Tale of Two Cities” is the most uplifting, the most inspirational, not to mention incredible literature. As a teacher, I think it would be quite difficult for a ninth grader. After “A Christmas Carol”, I would highly recommend it. “The Pickwick Papers” are amusing, but I think a little cumbersome to “new” Dickensians.

Absolutely perfect! Dickens is my fave. I really love Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend. I’m partial to The Pickwick Papers, as well as old Charles’s Christmas books. Thank you so much for sharing those quotes! :):):)

Lovely to see a tribute to Dickens on his birthday! My favourite Dickens will always be Great Expectations, but the first book of his that I ever read was A Tale of Two Cities which I love as well. Because I was studying the French revolution at the time, the idea of writing an historical novel using fictional characters in a factual setting made a deep impression on me. That’s probably why I like historical fiction to this day, because it takes us emotionally into an era of history in a way that the history books can’t quite do.

Susan, I also like to include some fictional characters who are observing the events transpiring around them. Sometimes the actual historical figures are too important to ignore, but the common people are the ones who had to bear the brunt of what those leaders did. In my current WIP, the ordinary people will be the focus.

There’s a novelette that often gets forgotten, entitled ‘The Cricket and the Hearth’. I believe he is at his best when he is describing the sanguinity of age, and so many of his books are brutal in their satirization of Victorian social mores. He never relented in attacking the causes of poverty, unlike Hardy, who abandoned the novel form for more than a decade after ‘Jude the Obscure’ I particularly like ‘Bleak House’, Dombey and Son, and yes, Great Expectations. ‘Hard Times’ is also worth a read, I think. Dickens the man? For his treatment of his family, and for his doting sublimation of young women, he would probably have fallen into the tender clutches of the Yew Tree investigation if he had lived today – but what a writer! .

It’s interesting to think about how location affects our lives. I once read a book about the plight of Jews in Germany under Hitler which was so different from a book about Jews during the same period in Chicago. The realization was humbling.

A lovely tribute to a grea man. I can’t imagine life without Dickens and his awesome stories. They’re so much a part of everything I love in literature. I’m not sure which is my favourite novel, but if pushed I’d probably say ‘Oliver Twist’. Excellent quotes. 🙂

I love to read, write, and drink coffee. They are the bread and butter of my soul. I really enjoy discussing books, poetry, and the like. Another huge passion of mine is dancing, and for fun I am an avid volleyball player. I live in the NW and I am a hybrid city/country lover. I enjoy spending time hiking through our beautiful Oregon forests, and riding horses at the family farm. I also equally enjoy strolling the downtown waterfront with a latte, gazing the city lights, and/or sipping a Café con leche at my favorite Cuban eatery.
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